[The blast was caused by a 10-ton meteor, of a
type known as a bolide, which created a powerful shock wave when it hit the Earth’s
atmosphere, the Russian Academy of Sciences said in a statement. Scientists
believe the bolide exploded and evaporated at a height of about 20 to 30 miles
above the Earth’s surface, but that small fragments — meteorites — may have
reached the ground, the statement said.]
By Ellen Barry And Andrew E.
Kramer
MOSCOW — Debris from a meteor streaked through
the sky with a blinding flash in western Siberia early Friday, creating a
thunderous shock wave that damaged buildings across a vast territory. Russia’s
Interior Ministry said more than 1,000 people were injured, 200 of them
children, mostly from shards of shattered glass.
Many of the injuries were reported in the city
of Chelyabinsk, about 950 miles east of Moscow, in a region where there are
many factories for defense, including nuclear weapons production. But there was
no indication of damage that resulted in any radiation leaks, officials said.
The blast was caused by a 10-ton meteor, of a
type known as a bolide, which created a powerful shock wave when it hit the Earth’s
atmosphere, the Russian Academy of Sciences said in a statement. Scientists
believe the bolide exploded and evaporated at a height of about 20 to 30 miles
above the Earth’s surface, but that small fragments — meteorites — may have
reached the ground, the statement said.
The governor of the Chelyabinsk district
reported that material from the sky had fallen into a lake on the outskirts of
a city about 50 miles west of Chelyabinsk. Officials told Russian news agencies
that they had sent police officers there.
The meteor event came hours before a small
asteroid, known as 2012 DA14, passed
close to Earth on Friday, which NASA was tracking on its Web site. Aleksandr Y.
Dudorov, a physicist at Chelyabinsk State University, said it was possible that
the meteorite may have been flying alongside the asteroid.
“What we witnessed today may have been the
precursor of that asteroid,” said Mr. Dudorov in a telephone interview.
Others, however, disputed that view, saying
there was almost certainly no connection. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, part
of NASA, said in a statement posted
earlier on its Web site that “preliminary information indicates that the
fireball in Chelyabinsk, Russia, is not related to asteroid 2012 DA14, which is
flying by Earth today.”
Prof. Alan Fitzsimmons, an astronomer at the
Astrophysics Research Centre at Queen’s University Belfast, told the BBC that
2012 Da14 approached Earth from the south, while the meteor struck the Earth’s
atmosphere in the northern hemisphere, indicating that the objects were
traveling in different directions. “This is literally a cosmic coincidence,
although a spectacular one,” he said.
Fiery meteors are not unusual, but they
typically evaporate far above the Earth’s surface, the Russian Academy of
Sciences said in its statement. This meteor was unusual because it was so hard,
and may have been made of iron, the statement said. Nothing similar has been
recorded on Russian territory since 2002.
Video clips from
Chelyabinsk showed an early morning sky illuminated by a brilliant flash,
followed by the sound of breaking glass and multiple car alarms. Meteors
typically cause sonic booms as they enter the Earth’s atmosphere. On Friday,
the force was powerful enough to shatter dishes and televisions in people’s
homes.
“I saw a flash in the window, turned toward it
and saw a burning cloud, which was surrounded by smoke and was going downward —
it reminded me of what you see after an explosion,” said Maria Polyakova, 25,
head of reception at the Park-City Hotel in Chelyabinsk. A video made outside a
building in Chelyabinsk captured the astonished voices of people who were
uncertain what it was they had just seen.
“Maybe it was a rocket,” said one man, who
rushed outside onto the street with his co-workers after hearing the blast far
out of sight. A man named Artyom, who spoke to the Moscow FM radio station,
said the explosion was enormous.
“I was sitting at work and the windows lit up
and it was as if the whole city was illuminated, and I looked out and saw a
huge streak in the sky and it was like that for two or three minutes and then I
heard these noises, like claps,” he said. “And then all the dogs started
barking.”
He said the blast caused balconies to shake and
windows to shatter. He said he did not believe it was a meteor. “We are waiting
for a second piece, that is what people are talking about now,” the man said.
The object was visible from the city of Nizhniy
Tagil, around 220 miles north of Chelyabinsk, where so many people called an
emergency assistance number that it stopped working, the Novy Region news
service reported.
The government response on Friday was huge.
Seven airplanes were deployed to search for places where meteorites might have
fallen and more than 20,000 people dispatched to comb the area on foot,
according to the Ministry of Emergency Situations. There were also 28 sites
designated to monitor radiation. No unusual readings had been detected, the
ministry reported.
The area around Chelyabinsk is home to “dozens
of defense factories, including nuclear factories and those involved in
production of thermonuclear weapons,” said Vladimir Lipunov, an astrophysicist
at the Shternberg State Astronomy Institute.
“No one needs to be told what the Urals is,” Mr.
Lipunov told the NTV television station. “A second hit in the same area is
unlikely and everything could have been much, much worse.”
Siberia stretches the length of Asia, and there
is a history of meteor and asteroid showers there. In 1908 a powerful explosion was
reported near the Tunguska River in central Siberia, its impact
so great that an estimated 80 million trees were flattened over hundreds of
square miles. Generations of scientists have studied that event, analyzing
particles that were driven into the Earth’s surface as far away as the South
Pole. An article published on the NASA Web
site on June 30, 2008, the centennial of the Tunguska impact, said
the object, weighing about 220 million pounds during its plunge, heated the
surrounding air to 44,500 degrees Fahrenheit and exploded in a fireball that
released the energy equivalent of 185 Hiroshima atomic bombs.
In the United States, NASA alluded to the
Tunguska incident when it said that it was watching closely as the asteroid
2012 DA14, 150 feet in diameter, is expected to whiz past Earth on Friday at a
distance of around 17,200 miles, the closest for many decades.
In a statement on its Web site,
NASA said Friday that there was no risk that 2012 DA14 would collide with
Earth. But it would pass within “the belt of satellites in geostationary orbit,
which is 22,200 miles above Earth’s surface.”
The asteroid was set to pass Earth at around
2:25 p.m. Eastern time, NASA said. “At the time of closest approach, the
asteroid will be over the eastern Indian Ocean, off Sumatra,” the agency said.
“Asteroid 2012 DA14 will not impact Earth, but
if another asteroid of a size similar to that of 2012 DA14 were to impact
Earth, it would release approximately 2.5 megatons of energy in the atmosphere
and would be expected to cause regional devastation,” NASA said. The asteroid
will not be visible to the naked eye, the agency added.
Referring to the “Tunguska event,” NASA said the
impact of an asteroid just smaller than 2012 DA14 “is believed to have
flattened about 825 square miles of forest in and around the Podkamennaya
Tunguska River in what is now Krasnoyarsk Krai, Russia.”
Viktor Klimenko contributed reporting from
Moscow, Alan Cowell from London and Rick Gladstone from New York.
